Special Interest Group on CRAP

I recently went to buy a dock for my iPod, to try and play music from the iPod through my stereo system. I read a bunch of reviews of devices, and opted to purchase a Keyspace Tuneview through Amazon. Step 1 is realizing that you aren’t purchasing it through Amazon, but that’s typical (and extremely irritating - more on this later).

When the device finally arrived, it appeared to be intact so I started hooking up all the cables and gizmos. The dock worked ok provided I used the button on the iPod, but the remote never functioned. It never synced up, and after trying every possible avenue to fix it, I finally gave up. We have all sorts of ways to fix it, such as searching online for tips, going to the manufacturer’s web site, following the directions on the manual. After investing two hours in this process, i sent an email to the manufacturer. After two days with no response, I finally gave up and returned it for a refund.

This experience reminded me of several things:
1. many consumer electronics components these days have very poor quality control.
2. Both Microsoft and Apple have failed to deliver products that really address user desires in the home entertainment space. Windows media player is a disaster, and Apple apparently forgot that people sometimes like to browse and organize their large photo collections. There are lots of manufacturers trying to plug the wholes in these products, but most of them are poorly implemented and lack inter-operation.
3. Amazon has decided to expand their business through promotions for third party resellers. I applaud their efforts in organizing reviews and centralizing purchasing, but their reputation will stand on the reputations of their partners and my experiences so far have not been good. In my case the shipping date was misrepresented on the amazon web site until after I made the purchase. Moreover, when you order things from multiple sources you end up having an order arrive in a bunch of separate packages with individual shipping charges, and every reseller has their own screwball return and warranty policies. If I wanted this much chaos I wouldn’t have gone to Amazon.

That’s my consumer rant for today.